3/5 ★ – Gibbs's review of God of War: Ragnarök.

Ahh God of War. A brilliant little series that has been clutched hard by the Sony Corporate Machine. There’s fantastic ideas in here, and a lot of them work, but there’s just so much dragging this down for me. There is still something fantastic about being this God-slaying machine, and he’s even more interesting than he’s ever been, but I wish this vision was more complete, more refined, and maybe just in different hands. But what these developers do right, they do very right. And their greatest strength is their writing. Once again, this a really cool story with some fantastically acted characters. You do care for Kratos and Atreus a lot, and their arcs in this game work well here again. Its a great relationship with some really great moments. The plot is definitely worse than in 2018. I think Kratos should feel a bit more flawed, I think Atreus does the right thing a little too much for the teenage incarnation of the God of Mischief, and Freya’s arc is solved in too much of a ‘sunshine and rainbows’ way for me. Most things are sanded down to be digestible and easy to understand and just a little too perfect. There’s pacing issues, filler, underwritten characters, macguffins and it’s all quite uncontroversial. It’s messier and less focused. But it does work - by the end you care about what’s happening and who these people are. The cutscenes are all directed well - whether that be in smaller character driven moments, or grand bombastic fights. But I don’t love how it’s told and how this game works. It’s so formulaic. Press X to shimmy through this crack while we talk about our feelings about the situation. Enter a circular area and fight a horde. Press X to climb up a wall while we talk about our feelings about the situation. Solve a puzzle the game tells you how to solve before you even see the contraption parts. Press X to crouch though a hole while we talk about our feelings about the situation. Enter a circular area and fight a horde. This is literally the entire game for 40 hours. It’s so ‘market-tested’ that is all feels quite MCU. Its harsh, but part of me thinks that the creators of this game are just good writers and not great video game developers. But this should be at least tolerable when I’m in such incredibly cool locations right. Not really? All of these realms feel incredibly empty. Of course it’s Fimbulwinter so some of this barrenness make a little sense. But all of these realms have no one or anything there apart from our main cast. I really don’t get the feeling that I’m exploring the 9 realms of the known universe, which should feel staggeringly grand and full of life. There’s nothing about any of these places that make me feel like I’m in a realm and not a video game level. Compare this to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth while I just played recently, which manages to make its fantastical world with a similar tone to that of Norse mythos, feel SO much more alive and expansive, with its cities and towns and farms, its historic areas, like it all exists without me. In God of War Ragnarok, I’m just walking through empty levels where the only life is the same generic enemies that attack me. It’s all so inorganic feeling. Not to mention that every single part of this is littered with paraphernalia. Lore, scrolls, artefacts, the same optional miniboss 12 times, ravens, treasure etc. It’s an open world collectathon in a slow moving linear level game. I’ve heard a lot about how this game handles puzzles, but I could not believe how annoying it is. Not only are these puzzles designed for 10 year olds, making me question their inclusion entirely. But if you spend longer than 6 seconds solving it, Atreus or Mimir will literally tell you how to solve it. ‘Hey if you shoot this with an arrow, we could move forward!’ Hell, even if you are solving it, one of them will say something like ‘Yeah…that looks right!’ I feel like this comes across as a nitpick, but God it’s so annoying to be treated as a seven year old in a game rated 18+. If you can’t even trust your players to solve the puzzles you’re putting in the game without telling them the answers…why even put them here??? But that’s probably my main critique of this game. Why is so much of this even here?? God of War tries to satisfy everyone and is so scared to create an identity outside of its narrative. I feel like this game doesn’t even know what it wants to be. You’ve switched from a Devil-May-Cry like to an action/adventure. Although this is the genre of literally ever other Playstation first party game (so a mainstay action game would be nice), I’ll forgive it because I do agree it matches the tone better of the story you’re trying to tell. But the combat is not nearly strong enough to justify this. I do think that the end-game boss fights are cool - you have all your abilities, and bosses have more interesting moves. Parrying is satisfying, and the fights are a spectacle. But the first half of the game feels barebones in these fights, and many of the enemies movesets are copied and pasted. It’s far better than GOW 2018 having like 2 bosses, but it’s hardly great enemy work. Although apart from improving the bosses, this game is extremely similar to 2018. I’m pretty much playing it exactly how I was back then. Sure it’s not really an inherently bad thing that a good game is like another good game, but if you showed me two clips, one being 2018 and one being Ragnarok - I couldn’t tell you the difference. It’s so safe and unambitious, and nothing has changed here really. But the real problem with its combat is its gank fights. The camera is awful and feels like it’s designed for a different game. In most of these fights, you’re fighting about 5 guys at once, and you will almost never be able to see them all on screen. This means that enemies attacking from off screen is CONSTANT, so the game must have a clever way to deal with this. Nope. There’s a little arrow next to you that shows an enemy is attacking you - and it barely functions. Its supposedly yellow when an attack is coming and red when it’s about to hit, except its red well before and after you need to dodge. On the highest difficulty where you die in only a couple of hits, this results in dodge spamming and running and spinning your camera constantly to try and see what’s happening. I can only hit the guy in front of me a few times before I have to start backing off and looking around. Its like they want to give you that Greek saga feel of thrashing through enemies, but give you a Last of Us camera where you can’t even see half of them. It’s ridiculous and makes you play in such a reserved, out of character fashion. A camera like Spider-Man’s would work far better here, but the game wants its over the shoulder one-shot camera for narrative purposes, and the combat really suffers for it. And what’s worse is the Norse saga now has a level system in its combat. Come across an enemy with too high a level and you’ll do almost no damage and die in one hit. Even if they’re a basic soldier. No longer am I the ruthless God tearing through minotaurs, but I can’t make a dent into basic soldier #3 because the arbitrary number above his head is higher than mine. The game is telling me I’m a powerful being beyond belief, and then hits me with an RPG level system that has no place in being here. It’s simply immersion breaking. Switching out one of my two skibidi slots on one of my 5 weapons for an enchantment that gives me +2 lucidity, and then having to do the same thing for my 4 armour slots - all of which are craftable and upgrade in several different ways through several different resources, feels so out of place in a God of War game. I am a pantheon destroying God of unparalleled strength, not a bandit in Whiterun. This game would feel better to play, and give it a better sense of narrative cohesion if this system was not in the game. I literally had to farm missions to fully upgrade my armour set of choice (Muspelheim) like I was playing RuneScape. Killing all these enemies to get XP, which you spend on a Ubisoft skill tree feels wrong too. And then I have to use each move a certain amount of times to unlock access to spend more XP, upgrading it slightly. Again, what game am I playing?? Because I don’t feel like the God of War. These systems are bloated beyond belief. Why do I need a luck stat in a God of War game and why have I got 7 different systems to improve my luck. What feels even worse than this is playing through the game the whole time and seeing all of these things you know you can interact with, but just can’t yet. Partly because Atreus and Mimir will literally spell that out for you (extremely video-gamey). If the RPG elements weren’t enough, God of War: Ragnarok also wants to be a Metroidvania! Except instead of being in a paraphernalia littered Metrodivaina map, these arbitrary ‘interact with me once you have the right equipment’ markers are placed in linear levels. This forces you to come back and slowly walk through these areas again in the late-game, offering nothing of real value and just becomes frustrating. It works in Hollow Knight and Castlevania because these games are built around these systems, but GoW throwing another genre mechanic into its mess doesn’t achieve this at all. Seeing another of these ‘come back later ;)’ spots in the early game will only make you sigh. So what is this? A Hack-and Slash RPG Metroidvania Collectathon Last of us like with automatic puzzles? Honestly the only thing this games feels confident in being is a film. And unfortunately it’s not one. It puts gameplay second to its story - and the whole thing suffers for it. It’s trying so hard to be cinema it forgets to be fun. I was originally going to give this game a much lower score, but the last 3/4 of this game just works. We’re at a pace of storytelling in which the whole game should have been, we’re actually commiting to Ragnarok and not doing random side things, the combat feels much better when I have all my tools, we’re actually doing the insane God fights that the series got its acclaim for in the first place, and the writing is all coming to a satisfying end. I wish this last quarter felt like the whole game did, because here I can see the vision. I had a lot fun with it honestly. But I wasn’t really enjoying the rest of this. There’s moments of brilliance here, and it’s a great concept. I still have a soft spot for this series. But this game is too ‘triple-A’ for its own sake. There’s too much bloat, too much trying to appeal to everyone, and too little faith in the player and its own strengths.